


Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November

by Edonohana



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alien Invasion, Aliens, Cats, Gen, Kittens, Military, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-07-14 10:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16039016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.





	Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yhlee (etothey)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/gifts).



> No cats are harmed in this story.

You always know when the Scorpions have been through a town by the sound of meowing. 

A cat, even a big one, is too small for them to eat. But an adult human, even a small one, is just right. And Scorps are _fast_. You know what Scorps call people who load themselves down with two cats in a crate, or get distracted trying to hang on to the cat in their arms? Dinner.

It didn’t take long before people started letting their cats go when the Scorpion alert sirens went off. They knew the cats wouldn’t be harmed, and they figured they could come back and collect them later. Hell, sometimes people _did_ come back. But sometimes they didn’t. And even when they did, their cats had met other cats as they’d explored their big new territory. And that meant more cats. 

Even in towns where the Scorps had come and gone, and everyone had moved back and life returned to what we call the post-invasion normal, the cat population took a big jump in the interim. You march in, and the first thing you hear is meowing. Cats are _everywhere_. 

Tabbies trotting down the streets like they owned the place. Yellow eyes peering out of dark mailboxes. Big white fluffball Persians curled up atop parked cars. Masked Siameses yowling in trees. Sphynxes that provide occasion for giving the fucking new guys the talk on how to tell a hairless cat from a possum. (Point one: possums have fur everywhere but their tail, while Sphynxes don’t have fur anywhere at all. Point two: possums don't purr.) And everywhere, _everywhere_ , litter after litter of fluffy mewing kittens.

I thought I had it down to a routine. March in, set up camp, clean my weapons, kill some Scorps, share my MRE with whatever cats are near, give them a cuddle and a bit of a brushing with the Furminator I swiped from an abandoned pet shop, make sure all the pet shops have their doors propped and windows broken so the cats can get at the dry food, don’t look at the reproachful eyes on the march out. 

Then we got new orders: free Springfield. Every Springfield. See, Springfield, MA was the first town they attacked. And since almost every state has at least one Springfield, almost every state had one that had been abandoned due to Scorps. So President Hickson thought it would be great for morale if we took them all back. Permanently. 

And so my rifle company was sent to liberate Springfield, MT. And set up a permanent base there, so it stayed liberated. (Montana was one of fifteen states that didn’t have a Springfield, but its governor renamed Riverside, MT to Springfield, MT to take advantage of Operation Free Springfield.) 

I had my own opinions about the way the towns had been selected, but mine is not to reason why, mine is but to do or die. (That’s a quote from a poem about a bunch of poor schmucks who got massacred because their CO was a fucking imbecile.) But after two years of marching to towns, liberating the towns, marching out, and hearing later that the Scorpions returned for a midnight snack run as soon as the poor schmuck civilians moved back in, I did think the base was a good idea. In fact it didn’t take any of us two years to figure that out and I bet it didn’t take the civvies two years either. But ours is not to reason why, etc.

Springfield, MT was just like every other abandoned American town: full of cats. Big tailless Manxes in trees, litters of nursing kittens in the back seats of cars, Siameses yowling for attention, a rare curly-coated Rex scurrying out of sight, a pack of calicos munching dry food from a ripped-open bag they’d dragged outside of a supermarket. Everywhere you looked, everywhere you heard, there were cats. Cat fur floated in the air like dandelion fluff. Hairballs clogged the gutters. The governor would’ve done better to rename the place Catfield, MT.

We set up our base in a gated retirement community, which raised _our_ morale quite a bit. Not only did most of us have actual beds, but a lot of us had private rooms. It was the first time I’d had one in years. Our CO, Captain Rhee, named it Fort Free Springfield, then changed it to Fort Free Springfield Five once she found out about the four other Springfield COs who’d had the same President-flattering idea.

The plan was to patrol the town, kill the Scorps, burn out their nests, dump insecticide over their spawning grounds, rinse, repeat. After we'd been doing this for three months, which was a complete spawning cycle, we'd start bringing back the civilians in stages. By the end of the first year, we intended to have completely re-settled the town.

It took the kittens one day to re-settle my room. 

My very first night, I flopped down on my bed. I nearly levitated off it when something soft squirmed beneath my cheek and let out a piercing mew. I turned the lights back on and yanked the pillow off the bed. 

A tiny, fluffy, pure black kitten with eyes big and yellow as harvest moons looked up at me and squeaked. 

“Hey, little fellow,” I said, tickling it with a finger. “How’d you get in here? You don’t look big enough to jump from the floor to the bed.”

There was a scratching noise, and my closet door opened by itself. I snatched up my gun, but what emerged wasn’t the world’s smallest Scorpion, but a pure black mama cat with a tiny, fluffy, calico kitten dangling from her jaws. She glanced at me, then leaped up on to the bed, deposited the kitten on my pillow, and marched back to the closet, her tail waving. 

I followed her, knelt down, and saw that there was a cat door cut into the back of the closet, invisible unless you knew to look for it. I sat down and waited while the black and calico kittens fell asleep on my pillow. The mama cat made four more trips, bringing me a gray tabby, a tortoiseshell, another calico, and a pure white kitten with sky-blue eyes. Then, though I waited, she didn’t return. I guess her job was done.

I got up and inspected the six kittens I’d been given. There was an absolute ban on pets on the base. But I looked down at their little faces, and I couldn’t bring myself to kick them out into the cold night. Besides, their mother had entrusted them to me.

I went out with my rucksack, and returned with litter, litter boxes, a scooper, disposal bags, kitten food, and kitten toys. When I came back, the kittens were excitedly exploring my bed; when I sat down on it, they began excitedly exploring me. 

The gray tabby swarmed up my shirt and on to my shoulder, where he began chewing on my ear. The black kitten and one of the calico kittens jumped into my lap and went to sleep. The other calico kitten climbed up my chest, then crawled into my shirt and started pouncing all around the general vicinity of my belly-button. The tortoiseshell kitten got its teeth into my belt and started gnawing and scratching away. The white kitten perched on my knee and started kneading and purring.

Yeah. There was no way I was getting rid of these little guys. Instead, I named them. Remington, the gray tabby on my shoulder. Princess, the white kitten on my knee. Nuisance, the calico inside my shirt. K-Bar, the tortoiseshell trying to kill my belt. Snoozer, the black kitten in my lap. Fluffy, the calico kitten in my lap.

“But that’s it,” I said to the closet door. “Six kittens are more than enough for one staff sergeant to hide in one little room.”

I don’t know who I thought I was talking to. Their mama had clearly done her duty and taken off. But I guess she spread the word about the softie in Room 112, because the next night, a pair of rowdy adolescent kittens, one chocolate brown and one a soft dove gray, came romping in through the cat door and refused to leave. There was nothing I could do but name them Hershey and Twilight, and fetch more cat food.

I had no idea the cat grapevine was so efficient. But every night, I got a new visitor, sometimes another mama with a series of just-weaned kittens in her jaws, sometimes a single adventurous kitten taking the trip all by itself. 

There were gray tabbies and orange tabbies, pure blacks and pure whites, champagne-colored kittens and cinnamon-colored kittens, long-hairs and short-hairs and in-between-hairs, kittens with blue eyes and kittens with green eyes and kittens with yellow eyes, tailless kittens and kittens with eight toes, Bengal kittens like baby ocelots and a kitten so bizarre-looking that I had to look it up to make sure it was definitely a cat and not some kind of alien hybrid. (It was a cat. A Ukrainian Levkoy, to be exact. I named it Bat Thing.)

Keeping them all fed and entertained and non-smelly and secret was one hell of a job. But I’m a staff sergeant. I’m used to tough jobs. And in the cold Montana winter, I slept _really_ warm at night.

To this day, I don’t know what prompted my CO to enter my room without knocking. It wasn’t an emergency, and people who walk in on Marines unexpectedly are liable to see things that will haunt them for the rest of their life. Maybe she was walking by when she suddenly remembered something she’d meant to tell me. Maybe she got mixed up over which room was hers. Or maybe she heard the meowing. Whatever the reason, I was minding my own business after hours when the door flew open and Captain Rhee barged in.

She looked from Fluffy in my mess kit to Remington on my shoulder to Bat Thing on my other shoulder to Hershey and Captain America and Weirdo in my lap to a whole pile of them on my bed to the rest of the tail-waving, prancing, pouncing, snoozing crew of them all over the floor.

Captain Rhee gave me a look fit to kill. I was all set to promise to get rid of them and then move them to a secret location, which would’ve been a pain in the ass. 

Then Remington took a flying leap, straight at the captain’s chest. She instinctively opened her arms and caught the fuzzy little bastard. Remington purred so loud I could hear him across the room and rubbed his head against her chest, improving her urban camo with gray tabby fur. 

Captain Rhee kept the glare plastered on for a good thirty seconds while she tried to unpick Remington’s claws, but both the glare and the unpicking were futile endeavors. 

Finally, she remarked, “Gets cold at night, doesn’t it? Sergeant, I’m ordering…” she counted quickly, her fingers twitching. “…thirty-six fireproof portable heaters installed in the base. I’ll take this one for my own quarters. As you were.”

She walked out with Remington in her arms. Even after they were out of sight, I could swear I still heard purring.

 

It’s been two years now and I guess the President wasn’t such a nitwit after all. Given the roaring success of Operation Free Springfield, it was followed by Operation Free Riverside, Operation Free Greenville, etc. It’s looking like we might finally be pushing the Scorps out. And once word spread about the morale-raising effects of fireproof portable heaters, other bases stopped laughing at us for having them and started acquiring their own. 

Once the civilians moved back in, they brought vets with them and had the strays fixed, so there aren’t as many kittens around nowadays. Our original kittens have grown up to be fine young cats. But just this morning, I caught a fucking new guy trying to smuggle in a litter of four. I ripped him a new one, then sent him to the quartermaster to have them named and assigned. 

“I don’t know how they do it where you’re from, but here at Fort F5, we don’t treat essential military supplies as contraband,” I informed him. “But since you’re new, I’ll do you a favor. You can tell the quartermaster I said you could have the calico.”


End file.
